Berlusconi Found Guilty of Tax Fraud

Italy's former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was briefly sentenced to four years in prison for tax fraud connected to his Mediaset empire on Friday, and was banned from holding public office for five years by a Milan court.

ROME: Italy's former prime minister and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi was briefly sentenced to four years in prison for tax fraud connected to his Mediaset empire on Friday, and was banned from holding public office for five years by a Milan court. But the court immediately cut the sentence to one year under an amnesty law approved by the then centre-left government in 2006 to reduce the overcrowding of prisons.

Berlusconi, 76, is considered certain to stave off any imprisonment by appealing through higher courts. The verdict came two days after he announced his retirement from politics. He condemned the sentence as "intolerable judicial harassment" and his lawyer branded the verdict as "absolutely unbelievable". Berlusconi has long denounced what he considers left-leaning magistrates pursuing political cases against him. He said on Friday that "if you can't count on impartial judges in a country, the country becomes uncivil, barbarian and unlivable and stops being a democracy. It's sad, but the situation of our country today is that way".

In the trial, which began six years ago but was repeatedly suspended, Berlusconi was accused of artificially inflating the price of distribution rights bought by his companies and of creating foreign slush funds to avoid paying taxes in Italy. The court also sentenced the media tycoon and 10 co-defendants to pay $13 million to Italian tax authorities for losses in what they called "large-scale fraud". The tax scam helped to create secret overseas accounts and reduce profits to pay fewer taxes in Italy.

The prosecution had asked for a prison sentence of three years and eight months for Berlusconi, the longest-serving PM of post-war Italy. Prosecutor Fabio De Pasquale said in June that Mediaset costs for the films had been inflated by $368 million from 1994 to 1998, and by 40 million euros from 2001 to 2003. The ex-PM was at "the top of the chain of command in the TV rights sector until 1998", De Pasquale had said.